Any discussion of the prior art throughout the specification should in no way be considered as an admission that such prior art is widely known or forms part of common general knowledge in the field.
The goal of knowledge management systems is to provide users with greater access and more efficient management of the information contained within the system. The advent of electronic media was seen as a boon to information management systems. With the increasing use of electronic media, the demise of paper as a communication medium seemed plausible. However, the promise of the “paperless” office has not yet come to pass. It is still true, for example, that almost all important documents are printed at least once during their life, because paper is still the most convenient medium for reading, annotating, and sharing documents. The combination printer/facsimile/copier room of a work group is a crossroads through which passes much of the relevant information embodied in documents. Indeed, many knowledge management systems have been focusing on ways to use both paper and electronic media.
Sometimes, documents being processed at the printer/facsimile/copier room need to be routed to one or more user accounts (e.g., email accounts), one or more output devices (e.g., printers, displays, etc), and/or one or more repositories (e.g., a database, memory, server, etc.). Depending on the type of document being processed, different destinations of the document may have different security access limits assigned to the document. For example, some destinations may have write access, others may only have read access, print access, secure print access, etc.
Conventional systems do not scan a document and apply a predefined security profile to the scanned document. Instead, in conventional systems, a document can be scanned and then manually opened in an application, for example, Microsoft Office or Adobe Acrobat, to have security attributes assigned. Such systems are labor-intensive and prone to error, thus resulting in high costs and inefficiencies.
It may be desirable to predefine a security policy via a workflow definition and to apply the security policy to a document image produced by a scanner before being used by another application. The scanned document image can then be routed to an application for use.